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The Chinese Cultural Revolution 1966-7
Extract from Jung Chang’s Wild Swans - 1991
'Soar to Heaven, and Pierce the Earth'— Mao's Red Guards
(June-August 1966)
Under Mao a generation of teenagers grew up expecting to fight class
enemies, and the vague calls in the press for a Cultural Revolution had
stoked the feeling that a 'war' was imminent. Some politically well-attuned
youngsters sensed that their idol, Mao, was directly involved, and their
indoctrination gave them no alternative but to take his side. By the
beginning of June a few activists from a middle school attached to one of
China's most renowned universities, Qinghua in Peking, had got together
several times to discuss their strategies for the forthcoming battle and had
decided to call themselves 'the Red Guards of Chairman Mao.1 They
adopted a quotation by Mao that had appeared in the People's Daily,
'Rebellion is justified,' as their motto.
These early Red Guards were 'high officials' children.' Only
they could feel sufficiently secure to engage in activities of this kind. In
addition, they had been brought up in a political environment, and were
more interested in political intrigues than most Chinese. Mme Mao noticed
them, and gave them an audience in July. On 1 August, Mao made the
unusual gesture of writing them an open letter to offer his 'most warm and
fiery support.' In the letter he subtly modified his earlier saying to
'Rebellion against reactionaries is justified.' To the teenage zealots, this was
like being addressed by God. After this, Red Guard groups sprang up all over Peking, and then throughout China.
Mao wanted the Red Guards to be his shock troops. He could see that the people were not responding to his
repeated calls to attack the capitalist-roaders. The Communist Party had a sizable constituency, and, moreover, the
lesson of 1957 was also still fresh in people's minds. Then, too, Mao had called on the population to criticize Party
officials, but those who had taken up his invitation had ended up being labeled as rightists and had been damned.
Most people suspected the same tactic again -'enticing the snake out of its haunt in order to cut off its head.'
If he was to get the population to act, Mao would have to remove authority from the Party and establish
absolute loyalty and obedience to himself alone. To achieve this he needed terror - an intense terror that would
block all other considerations and crush all other fears. He saw boys and girls in their teens and early twenties
as his ideal agents. They had been brought up in the fanatical personality cult of Mao and the militant doctrine of
'class struggle.' They were endowed with the qualities of youth - they were rebellious, fearless, eager to fight for a
'just cause,' thirsty for adventure and action. They were also irresponsible, ignorant, and easy to manipulate - and
prone to violence. Only they could give Mao the immense force that he needed to terrorize the whole society, and
to create a chaos that would shake, and then shatter, the foundation of the Party. One slogan summed up the Red
Guards' mission: 'We vow to launch a bloody war against anyone who dares to resist the Cultural Revolution, who
dares to oppose Chairman Mao!'
All policies and orders had hitherto been conveyed through a tightly controlled system which was entirely
in the hands of the Party. Mao now discarded this channel and turned directly to the masses of the youth. He did
this by combining two quite different methods: vague, high-flown rhetoric carried openly in the press; and
conspiratorial manipulation and agitation conducted by the Cultural Revolution Authority, particularly his wife. It
was they who filled out the real meaning of the rhetoric. Phrases like 'rebellion against authority,' 'revolution in
education,' 'destroying an old world so a new one could be born,' and 'creating new man' - all of which attracted
many in the West in the 1960s - were interpreted as calls for violent action. Mao understood the latent violence of
the young, and said that since they were well fed and had had their lessons stopped, they could easily be stirred up
and use their boundless energy to go out and wreak havoc.
To arouse the young to controlled mob violence, victims were necessary. The most conspicuous targets in
any school were the teachers, some of whom had already been victimized by work teams and school authorities in
the last few months. Now the rebellious children set upon them. Teachers were better targets than parents, who
could only have been attacked in an atomized and isolated manner. They were also more important figures of
authority than parents in Chinese culture. In practically every school in China, teachers were abused and beaten,
sometimes fatally. Some schoolchildren set up prisons in which teachers were tortured.
But this was not enough on its own to generate the kind of terror that Mao wanted. On 18 August, a
mammoth rally was held in Tiananmen Square in the center of Peking, with over a million young participants. Lin
Biao appeared in public as Mao's deputy and spokesman for the first time. He made a speech calling on the Red
Guards to charge out of their schools and 'smash up the four olds' - defined as 'old ideas, old culture, old
customs, and old habits.'
Following this obscure call, Red Guards all over China took to the streets, giving full vent to their
vandalism, ignorance, and fanaticism. They raided people's houses, smashed their antiques, tore up paintings and
works of calligraphy. Bonfires were lit to consume books. Very soon nearly all treasures in private collections
were destroyed. Many writers and artists committed suicide after being cruelly beaten and humiliated, and being
forced to witness their work being burned to ashes. Museums were raided. Palaces, temples, ancient tombs,
statues, pagodas, city walls - anything ‘old’ was pillaged. The few things that survived, such as the Forbidden
City, did so only because Premier Zhou Enlai sent the army to guard them, and issued specific orders that they
should be protected. The Red Guards only pressed on when they were encouraged.
Mao hailed the Red Guards' actions as 'Very good indeed!' and ordered the nation to support them. He
encouraged the Red Guards to pick on a wider range of victims in order to increase the terror. Prominent writers,
artists, scholars, and most other top professionals, who had been privileged under the Communist regime, were
now categorically condemned as 'reactionary bourgeois authorities.' With the help of some of these people's
colleagues who hated them for various reasons, ranging from fanaticism to envy, the Red Guards began to abuse
them. Then there were the old 'class enemies': former landlords and capitalists, people with Kuomintang (GMD)
connections, those condemned in previous political campaigns like the 'rightists' - and their children.
Quite a number of 'class enemies' had not been executed or sent to labor camps, but had been kept 'under
surveillance.' Before the Cultural Revolution, the police were allowed to release information about them only to
authorized personnel. Now that policy changed. The police chief, one of Mao's own liegemen, Xie Fuzhi, ordered
his men to offer the 'class enemies' to the Red Guards, and to tell the Red Guards about their crimes, such as their
'intention to overthrow the Communist government.'
A wave of beating and torture swept the country, mainly during house raids. Almost invariably, the families
would be ordered to kneel on the floor and kowtow to the Red Guards; they were then beaten with the brass
buckles of the Guards' leather belts. They were kicked around, and one side of their head was shaved, a
humiliating style called the 'yin and yang head,' because it resembled the classic Chinese symbol of a dark side
(yin) and a light side (yang). Most of their possessions were either smashed or taken away.
Mao let all this happen in order to generate the terror and chaos he wanted. He was not scrupulous about
either who was hit or who were the agents of violence. These early victims were not his real targets, and Mao did
not particularly like or trust his young Red Guards. He was simply using them. For their part, the vandals and
torturers were not always devoted to Mao. They were just having a wild time, having been licensed to indulge
their worst instincts.
In these early days, the newborn Red Guards had the immense prestige of being Mao's babies. It went
without saying that I should join, and I immediately submitted my application to the Red Guard leader in my form
- a fifteen-year-old boy named Geng who had been constantly seeking my company, but became shy and gauche
the moment he was with me.
Back at school, I heard that there had been many complaints from 'reds' demanding to know why they had
not been admitted to the Red Guards. That was why it was important to be there on National Day, as there was
going to be a big enrollment, incorporating all the rest of the 'reds.' So, at the very time the Cultural Revolution
had brought disaster on my family, I became a Red Guard.
I was thrilled by my red armband with its gold characters. It was the fashion of the day for Red Guards to
wear old army uniforms with leather belts, like the one Mao was seen wearing at the beginning of the Cultural
Revolution. I was keen to follow the fashion, so as soon as I was enrolled I rushed home, and from the bottom of
an old trunk I dug out a pale-gray Lenin jacket which had been my mother's uniform in the early 1950s. It was a
little too big, so I got my grandmother to take it in. With a leather belt from a pair of my father's trousers my
costume was complete. But out on the streets I felt very uncomfortable. I found my image too aggressive. Still, I
kept the outfit on.
Since June, there had been an unwritten rule that everyone should remain in school around-the-clock to
devote themselves entirely to the Cultural Revolution. I was one of the few who did not. But now the thought of
playing truant somehow gave me a sense of danger, and I felt compelled to stay. The boys slept in the classrooms
so we girls could occupy the dormitories. Non-Red Guards were attached to Red Guard groups and taken
with them on their various activities.
The day after I returned to school, I was taken out with several dozen other children to change street names
to make them more 'revolutionary.' The street where I lived was called Commerce Street, and we debated what it
should be renamed. Some proposed 'Beacon Road/ to signify the role of our provincial Party leaders. Others said
'Public Servants' Street,' as that was what officials should be, according to a quote of Mao's. Eventually we left
without settling on anything because a preliminary problem could not be solved: the name plate was too high up
on the wall to reach. As far as I knew, no one ever went back.
Traffic was in confusion for several days. For red to mean 'stop' was considered impossibly
counterrevolutionary. It should of course mean 'go.' And traffic should not keep to the right, as was the practice, it
should be on the left. For a few days we ordered the traffic policemen aside and controlled the traffic ourselves. I
was stationed at a street corner telling cyclists to ride on the left. In Chengdu there were not many cars or traffic
lights, but at the few big crossroads there was chaos. In the end, the old rules reasserted themselves, owing to Zhou
Enlai, who managed to convince the Peking Red Guard leaders. But the youngsters found justifications for this: I
was told by a Red Guard in my school that in Britain traffic kept to the left, so ours had to keep to the right to
show our anti-imperialist spirit. She did not mention America.
As a child I had always shied away from collective activity. Now, at fourteen, I felt even more averse to it. I
suppressed this dread because of the constant sense of guilt I had come to feel, through my education, when I was
out of step with Mao. I kept telling myself that I must train my thoughts according to the new revolutionary
theories and practices. If there was anything I did not understand, I must reform myself and adapt. However, I
found myself trying very hard to avoid militant acts such as stopping passersby and cutting their long hair, or
narrow trouser legs, or skirts, or breaking their semi-high-heeled shoes. These things had now become signs of
bourgeois decadence, according to the Peking Red Guards.
I had been brought up to be courteous and respectful to anyone older than me, but now to be revolutionary
meant being aggressive and militant. Gentleness was considered 'bourgeois.' I was repeatedly criticized for it, and
it was one reason given for not allowing me into the Red Guards. Over the years of the Cultural Revolution, I was
to witness people being attacked for saying 'thank you' too often, which was branded as 'bourgeois hypocrisy';
courtesy was on the brink of extinction.
When Lin Biao called for everything that represented the old culture to be destroyed, some pupils in my
school started to smash things up. Being more than 2,000 years old, the school had a lot of antiques and was
therefore a prime site for action. The school gateway had an old tiled root with carved eaves. These were
hammered to pieces. The same happened to the sweeping blue-glazed roof of the big temple which had been used
as a ping-pong- hall. The pair of giant bronze incense burners in front of the temple were toppled, and some boys
urinated into them. In the back garden, pupils with big hammers and iron rods went along the sandstone bridges
casually breaking the little statues. On one side of the sports field was a pair of towering rectangular tablets made
of red sandstones each twenty feet high. Some lines about Confucius were carved on them in beautiful calligraphy.
A huge rope was tied around them, and two gangs pulled. It took them a couple of days, as the foundations were
deep. They had to get some workers from outside to dig a hole around the tablets. When the monuments finally
crashed down amidst cheers, they lifted part of the path that ran behind them.
All the things I loved were disappearing. The saddest thing of all for me was the ransacking of the library:
the golden tiled roof, the delicately sculpted windows, the blue painted chairs.... Bookshelves were turned upside
down, and some pupils tore books to pieces just for the hell of it. Afterward, X-shaped white paper strips with
black characters were stuck on what was left of the doors and windows to signal that the building was sealed.
By then 'denunciation meetings' were becoming a major feature of the Cultural Revolution. They
involved a hysterical crowd and were seldom without physical brutality. Peking University had taken the lead,
under the personal supervision of Mao. At its first denunciation meeting, on 18 June, over sixty professors and
heads of departments, including the chancellor, were beaten, kicked, and forced to kneel for hours. Dunce caps
with humiliating slogans were forced onto their heads. Ink was poured over their faces to make them black, the
color of evil, and slogans were pasted all over their bodies. Two students gripped the arms of each victim, twisting
them around behind his back and pushing them up with such ferocity as almost to dislocate them. This posture was
called the 'jet plane,' and soon became a feature of most denunciation meetings all over the country.
I learned in later years that the pupils in my school behaved relatively mildly because, being in the most
prestigious school, they were successful and academically inclined. In the schools which took in wilder boys, there
were teachers who were beaten to death. I witnessed only one beating in my school. My philosophy teacher had
been somewhat dismissive to those who had not done well in her classes, and some of them hated her and now
started to accuse her of being 'decadent.' The 'evidence,' which reflected the extreme conservatism of the Cultural
Revolution, was that she had met her husband on a bus. They got to chatting and fell in love. Love arising out of a
chance meeting was regarded as a sign of immorality. The boys took her to an office and 'took revolutionary
actions over her' - the euphemism for beating somebody up.
'Do You Want Our Children to Become "Blacks"?'— My Parents' Dilemma
(August-October 1966)
My father had been looking out at the blazing sunset. He turned to my mother and said slowly: 'I don't understand
the Cultural Revolution. But I am certain that what is happening is terribly wrong. This revolution cannot be
justified by any Marxist or Communist principles. People have lost their basic rights and protection. This is
unspeakable. I am a Communist, and I have a duty to stop a worse disaster. I must write to the Party leadership, to
Chairman Mao. In China there was virtually no channel through which people could voice a grievance, or
influence policy, except appealing to the leaders. In this particular case, only Mao could change the situation.
Whatever Father thought, or guessed, about Mao's role, the only thing he could do was to petition him.
My mother's experience told her that complaining was extremely dangerous. People who had done it, and
their families, had suffered vicious retribution. She was silent for a long time, staring out over the distant burning
sky, trying to control her worry, anger, and frustration. 'Why do you want to be a moth that throws itself into the
fire?' she said at last. My father replied, 'This is no ordinary fire. It concerns the life and death of so many people. I
must do something this time.' My mother said, with exasperation, 'All right, you don't care about yourself. You
have no concern for your wife. I accept that. But what about our children? You know what will happen to them
once you get into trouble. Do you want our children to become "blacks"?'
My father said thoughtfully, as though he were trying to persuade himself, 'Every man loves his children.
You know that before a tiger is about to jump and kill, he always looks back and makes sure that his cub is all
right. Even a man-eating beast feels that way, let alone a human being.
On the last day of August I was awakened from an uneasy nap by a noise from my parents' quarters. I tiptoed to
the half-opened door of my father's study. My father was standing in the middle of the room. Several people were
crowding around him. I recognized them: they were from his department. They all looked stern, devoid of their
usual eager-to-please smiles. My father was saying, 'Would you please thank the provincial authorities for me? I'm
very grateful for their concern. But I prefer not to go into hiding. A Communist should not be afraid of students.’ I
did not realize that my father was being taken into custody, because the act was dressed up as 'protection.' Being
fourteen, I had not learned to decipher the regime's hypocritical style; deviousness was involved here because the
authorities had not made up their minds what to do with my father. As in most such cases, the police played no
role. The people who came to take my father away were members of his department with a verbal authorization
from the Provincial Party Committee.
Physical abuse finally caught up with my mother. It did not come from people working under her, but
mainly from ex-convicts who were working in street workshops in her Eastern District - robbers, rapists, drug
smugglers, and pimps. Unlike 'political criminals,' who were on the receiving end of the Cultural Revolution, these
common criminals were encouraged to attack designated victims. They had nothing against my mother personally,
but she had been one of the top leaders in her district, and that was enough.
At meetings held to denounce her, these ex-convicts were particularly active. One day she came home
with her face twisted in pain. She had been ordered to kneel on broken glass. My grandmother spent the evening
picking fragments of glass from her knees with tweezers and a needle. The next day she made my mother a pair of
thick kneepads. She also made her a padded waist protector, because the tender structure of the waist was where
die assailants always aimed their punches.
Several times my mother was paraded through the streets with a dunce cap on her head, and a heavy
placard hanging from her neck on which her name was written with a big cross over it to show her humiliation and
her demise. Every few steps, she and her colleagues were forced to go down on their knees and kowtow to the
crowds. Children would be jeering at her. Some would shout that their kowtowing did not make enough noise and
demand that they do it again. My mother and her colleagues then had to bang their foreheads loudly on the stone
pavement.
In the meantime, the Rebels in my father's department stepped up their assaults on him… One day, a group
of them barged into our apartment and marched into my father's study. They looked at the bookshelves, and
declared him a real 'diehard' because he still had his 'reactionary books.' Earlier, in the wake of the book burning
by the teenage Red Guards, many people had set fire to their collections. But not my father. Now he made a faint
attempt to protect his books by pointing at the sets of Marxist hardbacks. 'Don't try to fool us Red Guards!' yelled
Mrs Shau. 'You have plenty of "poisonous weeds"!' She picked up some Chinese classics printed on flimsy rice
paper. 'What do you mean, "us Red Guards"?' my father retorted. 'You are old enough to be their mother - and you
ought to have more sense, too.’ Mrs Shau slapped my father hard. The crowd barked at him indignantly, although
a few tried to hide their giggles. Then they pulled out his books and threw them into huge jute sacks they had
brought with them. When all the bags were full, they carried them downstairs, telling my father they were going to
burn them on the grounds of the department the next day after a denunciation meeting against him. They ordered
him to watch the bonfire 'to be taught a lesson.' In the meantime, they said, he must burn the rest of his collection.
When I came home that afternoon, I found my father in the kitchen. He had lit a fire in the big cement sink, and
was hurling his books into the flames.
This was the first time in my life I had seen him weeping. It was agonized, broken, and wild, the weeping
of a man who was not used to shedding tears. Every now and men, in fits of violent sobs, he stamped his feet on
the floor and banged his head against the wall.
The atmosphere outside was terrifying, with the violent street-corner denunciation meetings and all the
sinister wall posters and slogans; people were walking around like zombies, with harsh or cowed expressions on
their faces. What was more, my parents' bruised faces marked them as condemned, and if they went out they ran
the risk of being abused.
My parents could not go out for relaxation ether. 'Relaxation' had become an obsolete concept: books,
paintings, musical instruments, sports, cards, chess, teahouses, bars - all had disappeared. The parks were desolate,
vandalized wastelands in which the flowers and die grass had been uprooted and the tame birds and goldfish
killed. Films, plays, and concerts had all been banned: Mme Mao had cleared the stages and the screens for the
eight 'revolutionary operas' which she had had a hand in producing, and which were all anyone was allowed to put
on. In the provinces, people did not dare to perform even these. One director had been condemned because the
makeup he had put on the tortured hero of one of the operas was considered by Mme Mao to be excessive. He was
thrown into prison for 'exaggerating the hardship in the revolutionary struggle.' We hardly even thought of going
out for a walk.
One day in February 1967, in the depths of this overwhelming terror, my parents had a long conversation
which I only came to know about years later. My mother was sitting on the edge of their bed, and my father was in
a wicker chair opposite. He told her that he now knew what the Cultural Revolution was really about, and the
realization had shattered his whole world. He could see clearly that it had nothing to do with democratization, or
with giving ordinary people more say. It was a bloody purge to increase Mao's personal power.
After a charged pause, my father went on: 'This cannot be a revolution in any sense of the term. To secure
personal power at such cost to the country and the people has to be wrong. In fact, I think it is criminal.'
Questions
Why were young people the ideal agents for the Cultural Revolution?
How did the Red Guards react to Mao’s call to 'smash up the four olds’?
Who were 'reactionary bourgeois authorities' and how were they treated?
What were some of the practical social consequences of the Cultural Revolution?
What were ‘denunciation meetings’, explain what happened to those denounced?
Explain what was meant that ‘'Relaxation' had become an obsolete concept’.